In our latest blog article, we’re going to outline 8 things that businesses need to consider before making the move to the Cloud.
NB: It is important to note that not all IT providers use the same methodology, so some of the details provided below may conflict with the viewpoint of your current IT provider.
Like with anything, if you are thinking of moving any of your business, IT infrastructure or apps to the Cloud, you should seek third party advice from a qualified MSC provider such as ourselves. This is the main reason behind us putting together this guide in the first place.
1) Build a comprehensive understanding of why your business is looking to move to the Cloud
There can often be a number of different reasons why your business is looking to migrate to the Cloud – it could be something as simple as the Cloud offers better flexibility or even that your hardware is dated and it's too expensive to upgrade it.
For whatever reason, make sure that you understand this during and after the migration takes place.
2) SWOT up
This may seem like you are going back to basics somewhat but you really do need to go through the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of making the move to the Cloud.
Do you know what technology you are using? Are you able to move it to the Cloud? Do you have complimenting cloud-based services that will provide the role in the new environment?
All of the above questions and more need to be reviewed in a SWOT analysis.
3) Write out all the apps you use regularly
As businesses, we all have regular apps that we use on a day-to-day basis. You may discover that some are very common such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams or Word, which can be easily migrated to the Cloud. However, you may well find that you use other business apps that might not be so easily remembered – ensure that your IT provider has all the information about every app that you use in your business.
4) The associated costs
Once you have got all your priorities aligned with your business, it’s important at this point to take a look at how much the actual migration to the Cloud itself will cost. At this stage, it is clear that you know what you want to achieve and how your business will benefit so the next logical step is to establish a cost of completing the migration.
This comes down to understanding your needs.
What space do you require to get things done? What kind of data does your business generate? What types of service level agreements (SLAs) will you need to achieve your objectives? Write down some tangible answers to these questions then you will be in a position to look for a solution that will fall within your budgetary requirements.
5) Select the right IT provider
We might make you slightly embarrassed by this, but if you are reading this article and your current IT provider hasn’t mentioned about moving to the Cloud, then serious questions need to be asked.
It is a given that almost all IT providers in the modern world will believe that a move to the Cloud makes perfect business sense.
Try and find an IT provider that has moved other businesses to the Cloud successfully. This may help to highlight unseen lessons a cloud migration makes on a provider and your 1st question should be saying “who else have you migrated to the Cloud recently?”.
6) Plan out the migration
You will soon discover that most migrations happen over a weekend and any problems/issues occur once the migration has been completed.
It is therefore important to plan out the migration to take place when your business is not operating.
It doesn’t matter how experienced an IT provider is at moving businesses to the Cloud, there are always things that can be preempted and therefore a certain level of upheaval will be experienced.
Change is never easy but it will all fall into place once the Cloud services have been fully integrated into your business.
7) Extensive testing of backups
If you have signed up to our mailing list, you will realise how important it is for your business to effectively and efficiently backup your business data. You may be informed that you have a working backup solution but when was the last time it was tested to see if your data could easily be recovered?
Therefore, it is vital that your backups are all tested prior to the cloud migration.
8) Next Steps?
The final step is to get in touch with our team of IT experts here at Advantage who will be able to discuss your Cloud migration options and help guide you through the process from start to finish.
